Sony Reader on its Way

The launch of the Sony Reader is drawing nearer, and it has garnered another mostly positive review, this time from the Washington Post. The Reader gets high marks for its look and feel, as well as its ability to increase the font size for readers with vision trouble. With “twice the pixel density of most conventional LCDs, and on a par with the resolution of newsprint,” eye strain isn’t a problem

The device’s battery lasts for “7500 page turns,” and its memory can store 80 average length books. Sony has set up a store similar to Apple’s iTunes where readers can buy the books, and 10,000 titles are expected to be available at launch. Judging by the titles available for sale, the ebooks appear to fetch the same price as their paper counterparts. The device generally gets high marks, but not enough to make it worth the price tag for everyone, according to the reviewer: “Is the Reader worth $350? Only if you want to trim your luggage, stop collecting dead trees, or use the large-font feature for easier reading.”

Given how impressed many have been with the technology, I suspect those reasons will be enough to make the Sony Reader reasonable successful, especially if it can keep expanding its library of titles. More broadly speaking, books – the old-fashioned paper kind – are far from an endangered species, but the Reader may appeal to people for whom lugging around a bunch of books has gotten to be a pain. Were Sony to add the ability to download newspaper and magazine articles (perhaps this is in the works, I don’t know), it would up the usefulness of this device considerably.

According to the Web site, it looks like the Reader has begun shipping already, and is proving popular: “Due to overwhelming demand, new Sony Portable Reader orders may ship as late as mid-November,” reads a notice on the site.

2 comments:

I found this article very thought provoking. It seems just about everything else can get zapped into a handheld device, like an ipod, so why not books? However, I recently fell in love with audiobooks. The thought of picking one up had never even crossed my mind, but my boyfriend got bought me one as a present since I have a rather long commute to work that involves subway transfers (walking along the subway platform with your face buried in a book is not always the best idea!). I downloaded it to my ipod and I absolutely LOVED the experience. And I found out that you can download audiobooks right to your ipod without ever having to buy the physical CDs. So now I can't help but wonder if maybe audiobooks, and not ebooks are the way of the future. Thoughts?

I actually like Penguin audiobooks a lot because they have clips available on their website that you can listen to before you go ahead buy something. (if I'm going to spend several hours listening to a book I want to at least know that I like the reader's voice!)

And they have a podcast you can subscribe to also. The quality's not the best but it's actually turned me onto a couple books…

This article really made me think. When I was growing up in the 40's the thought of books on tape or 'podcasts' was about as realistic as social equality. My husband was illiterate so he would make me read books to him for about 8 hours a day. He was quite fond of the Nancy Drew mysteries – Delightful! Once he lost his vision, I took an old phonograph and rigged it as sort of a make-shift recording device. I had begun having an affair with his sister, you see, and before I would sneak out, I would record my voice on the record. This worked like a charm and in many ways was the dawn of the audio book. I almost felt bad when I came home one day and found him dying in his rocker. I always wonder to myself if I hadn't been so enthralled in my own voice on the recording and listened to the end of the novel, would Morty still roam the Earth? Hm, you tell me…thoughts?

You may have heard. Google has just launched a service called Google Print. Like Amazon, Google's service allows people to search through books. Google announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair that are adding a lot of major publishers and they will be adding many titles. As with Amazon, there is a limit to how many pages you can view. And, at this stage anyway, it's not possible to search the book database exclusively. I've found that the best way to get a Google Print result to show up is to type the word "book" and then whatever it is you're searching for. It'll be interesting to see if this develops further.

I learned about the Amazon de-ranking debacle on Twitter (follow me @EdanL, y'all). People love to argue that Twitter is a time-wasting site for people to announce what they're doing: They're doing their taxes, or they're drinking the best beer ever, man, or they're on the toilet. And it's that, certainly, but it's also an incredible way to spread information and start a dialogue. Most of the people I know on Twitter are other writers, or editors, critics, or publishers. I've learned a lot about the book world since signing up.But I digress.I was by turns upset and confused by the Amazon story (known on Twitter as #amazonfail) and I still am. What am I to believe, and what will it mean, in the long run, even after the "glitch" has been fixed? Am I simply being paranoid? Is mine simply the blanket distate-for-Amazon of an independent bookseller? Maybe. I don't know. I do know there's been a lot of valuable dialogue on this "ham-fisted cataloging error," and I thought I'd highlight some of it here.Mark Probst's Live Journal post started it all, and Carolyn Kellogg'sreporting at the Los Angeles Times book blog Jacket Copy helped me track the story as it evolved.There's this thought-provoking post from Richard Nash, who argues that we can't give Amazon the benefit of the doubt because, ...in a world where whiteness and straightness are 'norms' and males benefit from our patriarchal history, it is always the GLBTQ books, the queer books, the non-normative books that get caught in the glitches, the ham-fisted errors. As a contrast, here is Sara Nelson's (of The Daily Beast) interpretation of the reaction on Twitter and the blogosphere: That book lovers seized on this recent de-listing scandal as a vehicle through which to vent their frustration and rage at big bad Amazon makes perfect sense; to have a politically correct hook on which to hang one's argument makes whatever revenge one might wreak all the sweeter. Meanwhile, Clay Shirky had another angle about the Amazon fury: Whatever stupidities Amazon is guilty of, none of them are hanging offenses. The problems they have with labeling and handling contested categories is a problem with all categorization systems since the world began.At the Vromans Bookstore Blog Patrick used #amazonfail to talk about the danger of putting our faith (and dollars) into one company, and drew a connection to our shift to monoculture farming: It's taken us some thirty years (since the passage of Earl Butz's "Get Big or Get Out" Farm Bill in the 1970s) to realize that having a few corporations control our food supply was a really bad idea. (This post, actually, reminded me of theseposts Patrick penned for the Millions almost two years ago.)There are many other posts and reports on #amazonfail, including this one from the New York Times. And there is a petition to boycott Amazon, which, at the time of this writing, has collected over 26,000 signatures.It feels funny reporting all this on The Millions, which links to Amazon. This is not my choice, but one I understand and accept. We also have our Collaborative Atlas of Bookstores and Literary Places, and an upcoming walking tour of indie bookstores in NYC (Can we do one for LA next year? Maybe by bus/metro?). It's this diversity, and our excellent content, that I admire, and why I'm proud to write for this blog, links or not.And, before I go... In the spirit of Twitter/Blog culture, I would love to hear your responses to #amazonfail in the comments.